5 Tips to Improve Your Next Strategic Planning Process

Summer is the start of strategic planning season for many nonprofits, but too often, that planning process is anything but strategic.

Here are 5 important things to get right so your next planning process is strategic, effective, and meaningful.

1 >> Plan for Less

Many strategic plans read like an extensive wish list rather than a succinct perspective on the organization's most important priorities, investments, and intentions. This translates into organizations planning to use 100% (or more) of their staff and resource capacity. This ignores important realities - like ongoing high turnover rates, onboarding timelines, and the fact that other important things will come up. Plan for less capacity - let's say 65-80% - and leave room to adapt to what comes next.

2 >> Make Tradeoffs

Good strategy involves making clear, consistent choices about what you will and won't do to reach your goals. That means making tradeoffs. When you try to do everything at once, it's hard to know which parts actually worked - and it reduces understanding of how to create meaningful impact for the folks you serve.

3 >> Align Your Plan and Budget

Your strategy needs to inform your budget, full stop. If your budgeting process is run separately from your strategy development process, then your budget will win out every time and your strategic plan will become yet another expensive bookend.

4 >> Make it Make Sense

Your strategic plan is not a "one-size-fits-all audiences" document. Your staff, community, volunteers, donors, and other stakeholders all need to understand your strategy, but trying to make a single plan document speak to everybody reduces clarity and engagement. Instead, create a cohesive strategic narrative that can be adapted to different audiences and enhanced with the right kinds of data, marketing materials, operating details, and communications approaches for each audience.

5 >> Spend Time to Explore & Determine What You Really Need

Often, nonprofit executives come to LaFemina & Co. looking for one thing when they actually need something else. Many other consultants we know have the same experience. Before you jump into a new strategic planning process, spend time having conversations with experts and consultants you trust about what's most needed right now at your organization. You may be surprised by solutions that are a better investment for where you are.

This list is far from comprehensive, but it represents some often missed essentials for creating effective strategy. Have you seen these items impact strategy development in your work? Join the conversation on LinkedIn.